Gas-s-s-s (1970)

Directed by Roger Corman. Starring Robert Corff, Elaine Giftos, Talia Shire, Bud Cort, Cindy Williams, Alex Wilson, Ben Vereen, George Armitage. [R]

This youth-pandering free-for-all resembles intellectualism on a stoned groove. A leaked experimental gas at a military facility kills everyone over the age of twenty-five, but don’t expect a Logan’s Run-esque parable/thriller. Instead, expect an incoherent grab-bag of dumdum gags, sloppy satire, and pretentious canoodling—by Roger Corman’s standards, quite ambitious contextually, but too disorganized and self-satisfied to function. Its counterculture, anti-military-industrial complex heart is in the right place, but you may need to be a hippie-dippie yourself to find this slaphappy absurdism anything but tedious; Dr. Strangelove’s anarcho-satire status remains unchallenged. Alternate (and much longer) title: Gas! or (It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It). Joseph “Country Joe” McDonald of Country Joe and the Fish fame has a small role as a musician.

25/100